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Locked-in Syndrome, BCI, and a Confusion about Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enacted Cognition

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Abstract

In a recent contribution to this journal, Andrew Fenton and Sheri Alpert have argued that the so-called “extended mind hypothesis” allows us to understand why Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have the potential to change the self of patients suffering from Locked-in syndrome (LIS) by extending their minds beyond their bodies. I deny that this can shed any light on the theoretical, or philosophical, underpinnings of BCIs as a tool for enabling communication with, or bodily action by, patients with LIS: BCIs are not a case of cognitive extension. I argue that Fenton and Alpert’s claim to the contrary is the result of a widespread confusion about some related, but significantly different, approaches to cognition that all fall under the heading of “situated cognition.” I first provide a short taxonomy of various situated approaches to cognition, highlighting (some of) their important commonalities and differences, which should dissolve some of the confusions surrounding them. Then I show why the extended mind hypothesis is unsuitable as a model of BCI enhancements of LIS patients’ capacity to interact with their surroundings, and I argue that the situated approach with obvious bearings on the sort of questions that were driving Fenton and Alpert is not the idea that cognition is extended, but the idea that cognition is enacted.

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Notes

  1. For the classic statement of the extended mind hypothesis see [2]. Other labels include “active externalism” [2], “wide computationalism” [3], “vehicle externalism” [4], “locational externalism” [5] or “environmentalism” [6].

  2. I should stress that the confusion is not to blame on F&A. The situated approach to cognition is a relatively recent development with a variety of subtly different strands (see “Situated Cognition”) whose key tenets, theoretical and terminological commitments, and interrelationships and interdependencies are still in happy disarray, which leads to confusion even among the researchers working in the field [8].

  3. See [1], in particular pp. 122–124, for more details and further references.

  4. “GOFAI” is an acronym for “Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence,” a label typically used for the central idea of early, pre-connectionist AI according to which cognitive processes are best understood as rule- (or syntax-) governed computations over system-internal representations.

  5. It is unclear who coined the term “brainbound,” but it is a by now well-entrenched characterization of the opponents of situated approaches to cognition [19,20].

  6. When talking about “embodiment,” F&A seem to have in mind EC-II: “[w]hen the self is understood as embodied, the body is constitutive of the self” (p. 120; emphasis S.W.) [1]. Of course, the claim that the body is partially constitutive of the self does not literally entail that bodily processes are constitutive of cognitive processes, if to have a self is more than to be a subject of cognitive processing, for then it may be possible, in principle, that the bodily constituted parts of the self are merely the non-cognitive ones. What remains true, however, is that if the self, conceived of as a unified phenomenon, is bodily constituted, then so are at least those cognitive processes involved in one’s selfhood. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this issue.

  7. I tend to think it is a substantive one since some cases of embodiment (Lakoff and Johnston’s work on concepts, say, or work on the body’s role in catching fly balls) are much harder, if not impossible, to interpret constitutively along the lines of EC-II than, say, vision.

  8. Clark expresses this aspect of EMC in what he calls the “007-principle”:

    In general, evolved creatures will neither store nor process information in costly ways when they can use the structure of the environment and their operations upon it as a convenient stand-in for the information processing operations concerned. That is, know only as much as you need to know to get the job done. (p. 64) [33]

  9. An anonymous referee has pointed out, quite correctly, that one may wonder why I am talking about “extended cognition” rather than the “extended mind,” as F&A do. The reason is simply that because, as the present section shows, the idea that mind and/or cognition may be extended in the sense that they are spanning brain, body, and environment, has its roots in the situated approach to cognition prevalent in modern cognitive science since (at least) the early 1990s, the label “extended cognition” is a perfectly natural one. Although one may try to drive a wedge between mind and cognition, I doubt that anything of importance hinges on this for the present purpose. After all, F&A themselves are talking about “cognitive dysfunctions” (p. 120), “cognitive impairments” (p. 121), “cognitive capacities” (p. 125), or “cognitive processes” (p. 126) [1].

  10. Some enactivists of the more generic kind, I should add, would deny that Noë’s celebrated work on visual perception properly counts as “enactivism” (I am indebted to Miriam Kyselo for bringing this point to my attention, although I cannot go into the details). On a more personal note, let me add that I fail to see why the phenomenon Noë is concerned with cannot simply be seen as an instance of either EMC or EXC.

  11. The exact relationship between the enactive approach and EXC is, as so many issues in the debate about situated cognition, still unsettled. There seems to be an emerging agreement, however, that enactivism and EXC are mutually exclusive, but the reasons offered for this incompatibility vary [35–38].

  12. Of all the characterizations offered in this section, I am the least sure about the adequacy of this one, but it is adequate enough for the purposes of this paper and, I hope, fair enough to the enactivist.

  13. Note that when F&A say (in the long passage quoted above) that BCIs “will extend a patient’s cognitive as well as physical capacities” they seem to use the term “extend” rather in the sense of “enrich.” If that is all that is meant, who would disagree? But then the appeal to EXC is misleading, to say the least.

  14. I predict that the ultimate verdict will be negative. Even the most ardent defenders of EXC deny that consciousness extends beyond the organism’s boundaries [19,39], and without extended consciousness, there can be no extended self because consciousness is arguably an essential aspect of selves.

  15. In effect, it is an elaboration of what is called the “parity principle.” In Clark and Chalmers’ original presentation, the parity principle (then not yet so-named) was formulated as follows: “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process” (p. 8) [2].

  16. Incidentally, Niels Birbaumer and colleagues make it patently clear in their work on BCIs that what is restored is bodily, or physiological, processes, not cognitive ones: BCI, they argue, “replaces nerves and muscles and the movements they produce with electrophysiological signals and the hardware and software that translate those signals into action” (p. 770; emphasis S.W.) [40]. (I owe this quotation to Miriam Kyselo.)

  17. Except perhaps for the fact that I suspect that what F&A mean by “extension” of physical capacities is again (see note 13) more like an “enrichment” than the sort of metaphysical vehicle extension proclaimed by EXC.

  18. For more on the relationship between cognitive extension and coupling see, e.g., [19]. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

  19. At least in stationary settings where not only does the perceiver not move relative to the objects seen, but the objects do not move relative to the perceiver either.

  20. At other times, however, Noë suggests that the exercise of sensorimotor abilities is required only during the learning phase: “only through self-movement can one test and so learn the relevant patterns of sensorimotor dependence” (p. 13) [28].

  21. There is a relatively straightforward route from the perception-restricted enactivist thesis to the generic one. Based on Hurley’s so-called “shared-circuits model” [43] (according to which higher cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading, counterfactual thinking and deliberation may have originated in sensorimotor control processes) Nivedita Gangopadyhay and Julian Kiverstein have recently argued that “the sensorimotor behaviour which couples a perceiver to her environment cannot be separated from the perceiver’s cognitive abilities because subpersonal mechanisms of sensorimotor coupling enable personal-level cognitive abilities” (p. 71) [44].

  22. For another very illuminating and stimulating discussion of the potential implications of an extended approach to the mind (or to cognition) for neuroethics in general (not for LIS and BCI) see [46].

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Acknowledgements

I’m indebted to an anonymous referee, to Lena Kästner and to Miriam Kyselo. Miriam has brought F&A’s paper to my attention, and were it not for her, I probably would never have thought about LIS and its potential implications for EXC and ENC.

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  1. Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Albrechtstraße 28, 49069, Osnabrück, Germany

    Sven Walter

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Walter, S. Locked-in Syndrome, BCI, and a Confusion about Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enacted Cognition. Neuroethics 3, 61–72 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-009-9050-z

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